Wednesday, June 06, 2007

Salem Cemetery: A Community Still (Part 1)



For Mary and the Russell Historical Society in respectful memory of all who rest here.

A gravedigger once told my dad that the dirt is black and rich six feet down at Salem, the legacy of countless tallgrass prairie seasons cycling under endless sky. Everyone in this community forged by death was tied somehow to the land in life and it remains a good place for an old farmer to take his rest.

The first to be buried here beside a fold in the prairie as it begins to break toward the Chariton River was a Mormon refugee moving toward the woods and water at Chariton Point two miles northwest during the 1840s, carrying in his head Brigham Young’s vision of New Zion in the intermountain West.

The most recent, during 2006, was a farm wife in her 94th year who carried memories of a full life on the farm just across the road as she traveled toward home.

Time and the prairie wind have swept away the Mormon pioneer’s name and the exact location of his grave, but the memory of Ora Gartin still is fresh and lively as grass begins to heal during this summer of 2007 the wound inflicted when her grave was dug.

SALEM is located in the southwest quarter of Section 3, Benton Township, two miles southeast of Chariton and two and a half miles due west of Russell, just south of the intersection of the Blue Grass and New York roads.

The Blue Grass Road here follows the path of the old Mormon Trace, the trail blazed from Dodge’s Point in Appanoose County northwest past old Greenville and then due west through what became Russell to Chariton Point and beyond by Mormons during the late spring and the early summer of 1846. The Trace was used thereafter by most of the thousands of Nauvoo Saints forced to flight by non-Mormon neighbors in Illinois who would not tolerate their differentness. They moved past what became Salem in ox-drawn wagons, on horseback and on foot toward Chariton Point, then Garden Grove or Mount Pisgah, across western Iowa to the Missouri River and beyond through Nebraska and Wyoming to Utah.

At Salem, the main trail was joined by a shortcut used by some of these pioneers that meandered back southeast past Ragtown, then cut directly east toward Greenville across the prairie flats south of Russell.

It may have been this convergence of trails that made it seem likelier to loved ones that a grave here would be less likely to be lost. Those who mourned had no choice other than to bury, say a prayer and move on.

DURING the roughly 160 years that have followed that first grave, approximately 300 people have been buried at Salem. Of those, about 240 graves are marked, the locations of perhaps 20 unmarked graves are known and perhaps 40 more people, known but to God, lie buried here.

These people were overwhelmingly of Scots-Irish and German descent, although there are Swedes and others, too. Most were members of three churches: Salem Methodist Episcopal (later Salem Community) Church, congregations whose building stood in front of the cemetery from the 1870s until the 1970s and from which the cemetery took its name; Mt. Carmel United Evangelical Church, four miles south; and Otterbein United Brethren in Christ, four miles southwest. The only other cemetery in Benton Township is Ragtown, a mile and a quarter southeast and long unused. For reasons now unknown, several families began to bury at Ragtown, then stopped and began using Salem. In at least one instance, a wife was buried at Ragtown and her husband, many years later at Salem.

There are Civil War veterans of both the Union and the Confederate States here, as well as veterans of World War I and World War II. There are men here who took their own lives and at least one who was murdered, women who died in childbirth and dozens of infants today‘s medical practices would have saved, many victims of tuberculosis (then called consumption) and many more who lived long and full lives. Their descendants are practically numberless now and scattered like buckshot, but this remains a community and its members still have stories to tell.

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